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FBI Fights Testing For False DNA Matches
Statesman writes "The Los Angeles Times reports that an Arizona crime lab technician found two felons with remarkably similar genetic profiles, so similar that they would ordinarily be accepted in court as a match, but one felon was black and the other white. The FBI estimated the odds of unrelated people sharing those genetic markers to be as remote as 1 in 113 billion. Dozens of similar matches have been found, and these findings raise questions about the accuracy of the FBI's DNA statistics. Scientists and legal experts want to test the accuracy of official statistics using the nearly 6 million profiles in CODIS, the national system that includes most state and local databases. The FBI has tried to block distribution of the Arizona results and is blocking people from performing similar searches using CODIS. A legal fight is brewing over whether the nation's genetic databases ought to be opened to wider scrutiny. At stake is the credibility of the odds often cited in DNA cases, which can suggest an all but certain link between a suspect and a crime scene."
What we're seeing here is a crack in the government's facade of fake-goodness. The ideas we're fed are that justice is blind, which means (we're taught), ultimately fair; that prosecutors and judges and the legal system in general have our best interests at heart, and so on, platitude after platitude...
But the truth peers 'round the corner here. They're not interested in accuracy, else they'd be all for determining how well this works, or not. The process and the results would both be open. What they're interested in are convictions, because that's how they keep score. That's how the public is keeping score.
This is unfair and irresponsible on two fronts. First, if you get the wrong person for any reason (including using DNA evidence that is supposed to be basically infallible, but is, in fact, fallible); then you've done a wrong to that person, of course. But secondly, for every false conviction the prosecutor and their accomplices notch into their pistols, the real criminal is now completely free -- the case is closed. They're not even looking.
As a society, we need to stop trying to raise up any part of the system based upon count of arrests, convictions, tickets, etc. The temptation to go for easy answers is too high; obviously, if the FBI itself is victim to this, an organization that prides itself on its organizational integrity, groups that have less tradition of trying to do right -- like the local cops who broke down your neighbors door last week -- are going to fall even more prey to such pressures.
As we see that the FBI tries to prevent the truth from coming out about a tool that is less effective than they claim, as they try to prevent exonerating information from reaching the defense, we see true colors.
These people are not our defenders; they claim to be, but they have their own agenda, and it is not about fairness. They're simply counting scalps.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Unless the crime labs start encoding the full DNA sequence, even then identical twins will duplicate, the best DNA, for that matter finger prints, can do is prove it is *NOT* that person.
It is hard to believe the FBI won't do the study to get real numbers, but we've been here before. These are the same people who presented bullet lead evidence with equal certainty. The science is impressive but it means nothing when your original premise is wrong. In the bullet lead case, it turns out that matches were common and single boxes often had differences. The coincidence between two people is good reason to review the data and make sure DNA statistics are correct. Until that is done, the odds of DNA matches should be looked on with great skepticism.
It's screw ups like this that make the death penalty a bad idea. While life in prison is a terrible punishment, perhaps more cruel than death, it gives the state a chance to fix its mistakes.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Please support radical transparency and open source the government.
If everything is out in the open, there can be no hiding.
This story is total scientifically illiterate bullshit. A 9-locus match between unrelated people is not surprising. That's why we don't sue only 9 loci, idiots! There has never yet been a 13-locus match seen between unrelated people in the national database- despite the 5 million or so profiles currently in it. I'm sure the average Slashdot reader can manage to work out how many pairwise comparisons that is. (Hint- it's a pretty fucking big number.)
Questions:
1) How wrong is it?
2) Why is it wrong?
3) Who is responsible for this blunder?
Quite possibley this can kill DNA evidence. Somebody was more interested in convictions than the truth here. Despicable.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Why would they (law enforcement) not want there to be some doubt to DNA results? They're also being used to overturn old convictions. In the case of current investigations, there is also other information (fingerprints, etc.) to help match a suspect to a crime...
www.joking.net
A few decades later.
From the description, this seems like an example of the birthday problem. Briefly, in a group of 23 people the odds are 50-50 that two of them will have the same birthday, while in a group of 57 the odds are better than 99%. However, the odds that someone in the first group will share *your* birthday are far less, roughly 6.1%. Quoting the Wikipedia article, "For a greater than 50% chance that one person in a roomful of n people has the same birthday as you, n would need to be at least 253. Note that this number is significantly higher than 365/2 = 182.5: the reason is that it is likely that there are some birthday matches among the other people in the room."
Likewise, the odds of there being two people with matching DNA in a database are far higher than the odds of someone else matching *your* DNA. So it seems possible that the FBI could be quoting accurate odds, while at the same time there being lots of matches within the database.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
As an American once arrested by the SS/FBI for computer related crime a while ago, DNA testing always worried me. I can understand it for violent offenders (which is how it was started and then carried over to all felons).
I can also tell you, if you refuse to submit to testing, they give you what they call "diesel therapy," taking you away from the cushy club fed camp you were in and busing you around the system until you relent. If you were given a half way house sentence or probation, they can revoke either for not submitting a sample.
Dispite turning my life around, finishing my degree and now working as a developer for a medium-size firm, I worry at times that one night I'll be hauled away because some flunky at the FBI mixed up DNA samples or didn't compare them correctly. I can imagine this being a horror scenario for anyone who's never broken the law, but can anyone imagine there being even a slight chance a bunch of narrow minded, non-technical cops are going to believe me, even if the crime is something totally unrelated to my history?
What we're seeing is a consequence of basic math.
1/113 billion chance a particular person has the same DNA profile as me. 6 million records. So I have a 6 million / 113 billion chance of matching someone else in the database. Drop some zeros and thats 6/113,000. Of course, each of the 6 million people in the database has a the same chance of matching someone - so that's 6/113,000*6,000,000 - which means there should be 318 people who match someone else in CODIS, or 159 'matches'.
# of people matching = size of group * size of group * chance of match
Anytime you have something that has a small chance of matching, but a fairly large sampling group, your chances of matching are high, because your chances of a match existing within the group is the SQUARE of the group size.
So it would be surprising if there were NOT people who matched in CODIS. The question is, are there more or less that 318 of them, and how much more or less?
paintball
That's about a 1/500 chance of a random match, good evidence but not the 1/1E12 claimed. The FBI needs to get off it's extrapolation and study the data.
What's really threatened is Big Brother's DNA database. If the evidence is not conclusive, there's little reason to spend billions collecting it from school children. A lot of equipment makers will cry about that.
The LA Times says dozens of similar matches have been found. I have learned not to trust the media when they use questionable terms like "similar." By similar did they mean that in all of those other cases, 9 (or more) of the 13 genetic markers used were matched like they were in this one case? Or is the paper trying to make it seem more severe by saying dozens of similar instances exist, but these cases only match a couple of the marker--not nine markers. While this one example throws some questions into things, I want some more numbers before I start wasting a lot of money redoing every DNA test. Things such as scandal and fear sell papers. Using words such as similar allow writers to make things sound much worse than they might be. This sells papers.
That there is a 1 in 113 billion chance of things like this becoming an election issue with the general public. Right now, their pocketbook is the only issue. The bankers and speculators crashing the economy every election cycle serves as a very effective distraction.
What?
Workers to power! Smash the racist police state!
The FBI says that the chance of any given person matching another unrelated person is 1 in 113 billion. They claim that the reason the Arizona lab tech found as many matches as she did ("dozens") is because she was checking the whole database (6 million entries) against itself. This is a straightforward birthday paradox issue, then. According to the Wikipedia birthday problem page, the number of collisions expected given d= 113 billion different "birthdays" and n = 6 million "people in the room" is n - d + d((d-1/d)^n). This is about 160 matches! So in fact the FBI may be right. Note that the chance of a given person matching _anyone_ in the database is about 0.0053%, which is much greater than 1 in 113 billion.
Skin color is a quite superficial (literally) phenotypical characteristic. In any case, the only way to clear this up is with the research that, apparently, the FBI is trying to block.
We have to refocus everyone on the Rights of the Innocent, and get everyone to see that putting an innocent man in jail is far worse than doing nothing at all. We should ALWAYS be open to Science in the process, and the Justice system must itself ALWAYS be open to the same scrutiny and skepticism as any scientist.
And if not, the Justice System will really be an Injustice System. How the lawyers, the prosecutors, the Judges can sleep at night is anyone's guess.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
/me waits for episodes of Law and Order portraying this...
If I'm not mistaken, what you've described is the Birthday Paradox:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox/
I googled it and found this story:
http://www.proliberty.com/observer/prt0497a.htm
I never heard the term prior.
I think the really cool thing about this whole story is what it says about "race". For hundreds, if not thousands of years, and even now, people have using "race" and skin colour as reasons for subjugation. But here we have the first cast of extremely close matching DNA, 1 in 113 billion, and they are from different "races". Wow.
This, if anything, should dispel any stupid theories about the difference of "race" within the human species.
Reading the article does make it seem like the issue needs to be examined, and that the '1 in 100 billion' odds should be re-evaluated.
However, I think the main problem is that most people don't understand statistics (all my stats courses are a blurry memory now), and just jump to the wrong (or exaggerated) conclusions. Common sense gives people a distorted view of likelihood and chance. Why else do people play the lottery, when buying a ticket does not significantly improve your odds of winning?
But Troyer compared all 65,000 profiles in Arizona's database to each other, resulting in about 2 billion comparisons. Each comparison made it more likely she would find a match.
When this "database effect" was considered, about 100 of the 144 matches Troyer had found were to be expected statistically, Myers found.
Troyer's search also looked for matches at any of 13 genetic locations, while in a real criminal case the analyst would look for a particular profile -- making a match far less likely.
Further, any nonmatching markers would immediately rule out a suspect. In the case of the black and white men who matched at nine loci, the four loci that differed -- if available from crime scene evidence -- would have ensured that the wrong man was not implicated.
The presence of relatives in the database could also account for some of Troyer's findings, the FBI and other experts say. Whether that's the case would require cumbersome research because the databases don't contain identifying information, they say.
It's easy to read the rest of the article, then gloss over and ignore the above paragraphs, thinking 'The sky is falling! DNA is totally unreliable!'.
In some ways it's understandable that the FBI would want to block these kinds of inquiries from defense lawyers, but it seems important that someone run the (controlled) searches and test out the estimated likelihoods.
Am I the only one who things the information about the characteristics of DNA evidence isn't understood as well as it could be? For example, ever notice how 20 years later or so a convicted murder can be cleared because of new DNA evidence that doesn't match the DNA of the killer? Has anyone done an experiment to see how DNA evidence could possibly change over the course of 20+ years?
And roll back our police state.
DROP TABLE DNA-DATABASE;
as long as were at it....
DROP TABLE NO-FLY;
I wonder how they calculate the 1 in X stats? For example, it occurs to me that markers may NOT be independent of one another. That is to say, the chance of having marker A might be 1% and the chance of having marker B might be 5%, but the chance of having BOTH might very well be higher (or lower) than .05%.
Without independent examination of the data, I wonder whether we're just seeing statistical artifacts, or whether their model is flawed.
Keeping it secret does NOT engender any trust, though. They should allow independent statisticians to run tests and prove the accuracy of their model. I wouldn't be surprised if clever techniques were available to improve it, so their resistance seems puzzling to me.
Even if they're worried about losing some case because they "know" the guy is guilty, why should they resist having to *prove* that?
The government doesn't have your best interests at heart! News at eleven.
Not to troll, but law enforcement agencies are really more interested in convictions than the truth. For instance, Virginia has a law that places a 21-day time limit on new evidence that can be used to exonerate someone wrongly convicted. I'm sure the FBI doesn't want it's coveted CODIS database subject to any doubt.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The rate of accuracy of the system can never exceed that of the humans involved in the process. If a human technician calls a non-match a match or a match a non-match 1 in 200 times (and though I can't remember where I read it, I've read that that's the actual figure obtained by reviewed the records of DNA techs) then the chance that two DNA samples would be said to match each other if they were not actually from the same donor are not "1 in 668 jillion" but ... 1 in 200.
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
DNA can be modified. HeartMath as well as others have done research which shows that DNA changes, making it maybe a little less reliable than fingerprints as far as evidence goes.
Of course I didn't RTFA... why would I do that? You really are new here aren't you? Don't let my UID fool you.
Outsourcing prisons to China? That's a sure fire way to start a bidding war between Guantanamo, shady Eastern European nations and any third world country with an ample supply to testicle jumper cables.
And what does that statistic represent? It sounds like they mean that there is a 1/113billion chance that if the suspect were picked at random and the sample as well, they would match. i.e. the chance of two randomly picked people matching on the chosen DNA sequences is 1/113billion. But the sample is not random, and the more relevant question might be,"What is the probability that a person chosen at random matches this particular sequence?". It should be a conditional probability. In that case I don't see how the odds could be worse than 1/population of the earth.
Then there's the question of what sample space they're drawing their hypothetical samples from: the planet's, the United States, the national database, or just that state's database.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
When it comes to systems, you have the problem of Dynamics. Every system is going to change, over time, either due to external forces, internal forces, or conscious change.
When it comes to evidence, it is just that: Evidence. Unless the defendant confesses, or they find the defendant's fingerprints in the victims blood, then there is no proof, only evidence. Defense attorneys must prove why the evidence *is not* convincing, while prosecutors have to prove why evidence *is* convincing.
Technically, it is incorrect to claim a "False Match", since there we several loci that did in fact match.
The question of "# of lucus matches" can work both ways: A prosecutor can use a relatively high locus match to establish a high level of probability, while a defender can use a low locus match count to establish a low level of probability. Instaed of basing accuracy on a threshold, prosecutors and defenders should be treating the number of locus matches as an indicator of how credible the evidence is.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
For obvious medical privacy reasons, you don't want to store the entire DNA in CODIS, but you should do a full DNA test on newly-collected forensic evidence and on the suspect.
For existing forensic evidence, when you find a suspect, do as good of a test as you can, within the limits of the technology and with consideration for sample degradation.
If the comparisons are off by as little as one gene, further investigation is needed to ask "why." Sure, it may be chromosome damage that affected the crime-scene or suspect sample, environmental damage, or even the limits of the testing, but at least ask the question.
Oh, of course, when giving statistical evidence in court, be sure you say "The odds of this sample belonging to more than one person who lives within a 100 km radius of the crime is 1 in X, the odds of this sample belonging to more than one person who lives within this country is 1 in Y, and the odds of this sample belonging to to two people alive today on planet Earth is 1 in Z. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this, combined with the other evidence, points to the defendant beyond a reasonable doubt."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What if we lived in a world where everyone's DNA digest was on file.
What if you then used geography and DNA to generate leads: If there is a crime that leaves DNA, and the crime scene indicates it was very likely a local, interview anyone who lives close by who has the wrong DNA.
This seems no more offensive than exhaustively comparing security-camera footage to the driver's license database or, where the photo indicates a high school-aged person, yearbook photos.
I'm not saying driver's license database mining isn't offense, only that it's on par with DNA-database-mining, assuming the databases are both nearly comprehensive.
It's probably more reliable than generating leads off of a police sketch.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
At the moment there is insufficient downside to a wrongful conviction for anyone involved (apart from the innocent person convicted). I propose that if a conviction is shown to have been wrongful then everybody involved (the cops, prosecutors, jury, judge, etc.) should serve the same penalty (or part penalty) as the wrongfully convicted person had to up to the point the conviction was quashed.
namgge
I think there's a real chance the calculation for the denominator is scrambled too. Let's be conservative and say it's off by a factor of 10.
To the public, "1 in 11 billion chance" still sounds like lottery odds, but then your math technique would demonstrate thousands of matches, enough to cast real doubts.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I know nobody here ever reads the articles, but it really can be worthwhile.
According to the article the original search was among only the Arizona database of 65000 records and not the full FBI CODIS database of 6 million records. Among those 65000 records 122 matches of 9 loci were found.
Some "new math" style computation says that means the FBI's been lying via willful ignorance when they testify there is a 1/113 billion chance of a 9 loci match and they should have been reporting the still-impressive-but-less-so statistic of 1/1 billion chance of such a match.
A error of two orders of magnitude is certainly significant even if the correct value is impressive enough that jurors are still likely to give it the same weight of consideration.
... so you mean that black drug users are more likely to be stupid enough to let themselves get caught? Perhaps they've watched one too many rapper (Eminem and the like notwithstanding; predominantly black) videos that tend to taunt authority, showing themselves as being able to get away from the police virtually every time?
Don't get me wrong - I'm sure there's bias, simply because there is still quite a bit of racism (from both sides) in the U.S., but I don't think that racial profiling -alone- is responsible for discrepancies in crime statistics.
(apart from the article not even mentioning the birthday paradox) is this:
A database that gets corrupted by searching in it? Jesus.
I think I found some fail:
Of course, each of the 6 million people in the database has a the same chance of matching someone...which means there should be 318 people who match someone else in CODIS, or 159 'matches'.
Is this really how it works? If there is a 6/113k chance that I'll match someone, it's not that I'll match someone who doesn't match another person. It's the same as calculating who will share a birthday with someone else, right? Overlap on any roll of the dice is as likely as any other individual non-overlap result (rolling 6, 6 is as likely as 6, 3)
So I don't think you can say that there are 159 pairs at all, because even if it happens to be true, it's misleading. The significant datum is that 318 people can be falsely convicted, period.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Remember the "birthday problem"? "How likely do you think it is that any two people in this classroom have the same birthday?" Most of the kids take a quick look around, see ~30 people in the room, know there's 365 days in a year and think--not very likely. But there's usually a match. In a classroom full of kids, the probability that any two children have the same birthday is (we'll ignore leap year for simplicity) 1/365. We need to know the probability that none of the kids have the same birthday. The probability of there being no collisions between two kids is still 1/365--this is just a more useful wording of the criterion. So, first 2 kids, probability of a collision: 1/365 Third kid--if his b-day lands on either of the first two kids' you get a hit: 2/365 Fourth--3/365 chance of a collision. ...
And, of course, if you had 366 kids in the room, the last one's a sure thing.
You multiply the probabilities a series of independant events to get the probability of the whole series.
If we have 30 kids and 365 days, we want to know the chances of 30 misses (no collisions) in a row.
If P is the probability of something happening, then probability of NOT (something happening) is 1-P
So, probability of 30 misses in a row will be 1-(1/365) * 1-(2/365) * 1-(3/365) * ... * 1-(30/365).
Which is ~.2703.
So, 1-.2703 tells you that if you've got 30 kids in the room you've got nearly a 3/4 shot at two of them having the same birthday.
Quickly iterating through the same process in oo.o calc for an FBI database with... ...ability to recognize 113E+09 unique DNA profiles ...DNA from a million folks (no idea how many of us they really have)
gives you .988 probability of collision.
BTW, the general formula for the "birthday problem" is written as follows:
P=d!/[(d-n)!(d^n)]
Where
P=probability of no collisions
d=number of days in the year
n=number of students in the sample
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
And this is relevant how? You've already told us they were distinct people, this doesn't make them more distinct.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Remember the "birthday problem"?
"How likely do you think it is that any two people in this classroom have the same birthday?"
Most of the kids take a quick look around, see ~30 people in the room, know there's 365 days in a year and think--not very likely.
But there's usually a match.
In a classroom full of kids, the probability that any two children have the same birthday is (we'll ignore leap year for simplicity) 1/365.
We need to know the probability that none of the kids have the same birthday.
The probability of there being no collisions between two kids is still 1/365--this is just a more useful wording of the criterion.
So, first 2 kids, probability of a collision: 1/365 ...
Third kid--if his b-day lands on either of the first two kids' you get a hit: 2/365
Fourth--3/365 chance of a collision.
And, of course, if you had 366 kids in the room, the last one's a sure thing.
You multiply the probabilities a series of independant events to get the probability of the whole series.
If we have 30 kids and 365 days, we want to know the chances of 30 misses (no collisions) in a row.
If P is the probability of something happening, then probability of NOT (something happening) is 1-P
So, probability of 30 misses in a row will be 1-(1/365) * 1-(2/365) * 1-(3/365) * ... * 1-(30/365).
Which is ~.2703.
So, 1-.2703 tells you that if you've got 30 kids in the room you've got nearly a 3/4 shot at two of them having the same birthday.
Quickly iterating through the same process in oo.o calc for an FBI database with... ...ability to recognize 113E+09 unique DNA profiles ...DNA from a million folks (no idea how many of us they really have) .988 probability of collision.
gives you
BTW, the general formula for the "birthday problem" is written as follows:
P=d!/[(d-n)!(d^n)]
Where
P=probability of no collisions
d=number of days in the year
n=number of students in the sample
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
As I've said time and time again. Forensic science is a scam. Second rate statisticians and second rate politicians team up with second rate scientists and second rate TV shows to convince the public that forensic superheroes can detect evidence of any evil crime you commit. It's just a way to keep the people under control.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Unchecked state power is a danger to everyone. The FBI's court filings to prevent DNA statistical studies are transparently self serving. Imagine if they got their wish and had everyone in their database. Million of innocent people would be subjected to unreasonable suspicions. Such plans should be abandoned and all efforts made to release people who were wrongly convicted, something that DNA testing seems to be good for. Great injustice has been done because the state granted itself the power to punish based on what it considered reasonable extrapolation instead of truth backed up by real data. It reminds me of witch trials.
Prison violence proves that surrendering your rights to the state does not make you safe. All kinds of state wards have suffered all kinds of abuse in direct proportion to the control and trust guardians are given. It is nearly impossible to administer justice in a place where no one is trusted but abuse must always be checked for and discouraged. This is one of the reasons state supported torture is so horrible. A cruel state that is more interested in punishment and revenge than it is in justice and protection will abuse guilty and innocent people alike. The ultimate abuse, however, remains the loss of life.
The test to "prove" paternal or sibling relations fails as much as one in thousand due to "chimera" effects. DNA "leaks" mother and child, between siblings. Soem sperm mitchondria survive, etc.
The most famous case the last Russian czar's that looke like the children had multiple mothers due to chimera mitchondria.
The use of computers means that we do not have to use a simple majority to make decisions. And the use of the internet, an open system, means that a majority isn't really even a useful concept.
Instead, imagine an infinite (for practical purposes) number of interconnected communities, each with a governance structure. You as a user can participate in any of them, but obviously not in all of them. Especially so if participation requires more involvement than mere voting. So you will have to make choices about which communities (read, which "governments") you want to participate in. That self-selecting into communities changes the concept of majority and consensus building.
Additionally, a government can be a direct democracy without giving everyone a completely equal say. If there is a community associated with each government, then people may be able to distinguish themselves within that community, either informally or formally through a scoring system.
These concepts are still new, and there are details we are still working out, but we are approaching them as mere engineering problems. If we define the system well enough, the internet will figure out how to use it effectively. You are quite welcome to come join us in figuring out how to make this work.
P.S. I am a member of the Metagovernment... but I hardly think we count as "the government." Not yet anyway. :)
You mean OJ didn't actually kill his ex-wife?!?
"Never as a question you don't already know the answer to."
You're missing the part about the adversarial system. If the prosecutor presents 'evidence' that is false, that's why there's also a defense attorney and defense witnesses.
Prosecutors are primarily interested in convictions, but defense attorneys are primarily interested in acquittal. No one wants to present something that is definitively false because then the other party will show that what you/your expert says was definitively false, and discredit your expert and you case, hurting your chances of success.
paintball
It's a simple case of a brother from another mother
You might be right, but I'm sure there are other reasons. Not to claim that it's right to ignore this, but presumably they're also concerned about the likely colossal expense of re-examining every single case for which this kind of evidence was used in a timely fashion, re-establishing other evidence to keep the convictions -- if that's even possible long after the date, and massive compensation payouts for wrongful imprisonment (or perhaps to families in cases of execution) in the many cases that can't reliably be proved without the DNA evidence. This is also not to mention the likeliness of a large number of people who could actually be quite dangerous getting released on technicalities before they're ready.
Right or wrong, this situation has potential to be a lawyers' dream.
Hmm, that's interesting. I think your post should probably be called Computers != Direct Democracy != Mob Rule, and that's true. I just assumed direct democracy would be used, and hadn't thought about separate, autonomous communities being used (though that's one of my favorite political ideals) or individuals voting for others and giving them weighted votes, creating a sort of Direct Democracy/Representative Democracy mix.
I hadn't really had enough time to look at it closely before, but now Metagovernment has just become a whole lot more interesting to me, as it incorporates a lot of my own ideas (Direct Democracy, Voluntarism, etc.) and fixes (or attempts to fix) many important problems.
Mod parent up.
.... i bet they will be so glad to get out
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
That patriotism isn't necessarily a good thing
The fact is, police and prosecutors will happily send you to jail for life, or to death row, to further their own careers. They prosper from convictions, not from justice. This is a "conspiracy" in that they work together to convict the person they've chosen to convict, and they'll collude to make their evidence seem stronger, hide exculpatory evidence, rely on jailhouse snitches, plant evidence, or whatever it takes, short of planting a corpse in your trunk.
Not all of them are like this, probably not even most, but there are so many links in the chain, all of them being pressured to get a conviction, that somewhere shortcuts will be taken. They convince themselves that you are guilty and then make sure that the jury sees what they want them to see.
This is a human problem, not a cop problem. People aren't as moral as we like to think they are, and they will rationalize whatever is in their best interest to rationalize. Only vigilant oversight and a concerted effort to sustain the presumption of innocence will keep people honest. Problem is, those have been discredited as well. Government oversight and presumption of innocence are now grouped under "helping the terrorists."
These morons are no different than the KGB. I have had dealings with both of these kinds of morons, some in SE Asia, and some in the SF bay area 45 years ago. Which is why I exercise my 2nd amendment rights, and have NO problems using them on those who would try to run over my rights! Shoot first!
corollary to "honest men have nothing to fear from the law" should be "honest government has nothing to fear from facts"
FreeBSD for the impatient.
You just caught the FBI red handed trying to literally block justice. Disband them. Don't laugh, they're supposed to be your government, not you their subjects.
Then, wasn't there some rule (I'm not American so that's my excuse for not knowing...) about disbanding the FBI if they operated outside the country, and the CIA if they should ever be caught operating INSIDE the country? This is neither, but both have happened flagrantly to no effect on their standing.
While American Pediatrics is opposed to co-sleeping, this is in direct contradiction of all evidence. The explanation is straightforward: the infant will follow the breathing/sleep patterns of the parents, and is kept from falling into the extremely deep sleep at which SIDS occurred. Also the parents are right there to notice as soon as anything is wrong.
http://www.babyreference.com/Cosleeping&SIDSFactSheet.htm
(subscription required)
Why babies should never sleep alone: A review of the co-sleeping controversy in relation to SIDS, bedsharing and breast feeding .
Paediatric Respiratory Reviews , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Pages 134 - 152
J . McKenna , T . McDade
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
The central issue is how a DNA database match should be weighed in court. The 1 in 113 billion figure is the chance of randomly selecting a single unrelated person from the population with a given DNA profile. A database search is not a random selection and a database likely contains relatives. The statistics that are currently in use assume the individuals being searched are unrelated. Some labs will factor in the size of the database (np method), while others will not.
A couple of corrections with the above comments:
The term "DNA Fingerprinting" is quickly disappearing and was argued against from the beginning by many due to the lack of a sound scientific foundation for fingerprints. "DNA Profiling" is much more appropriate.
The Arizona database search utilized their state database of approximately 65,000 individuals, not 6 million. It is expected that you would see around 100 pairs of matching individuals at 9+ loci when the profiles are unrelated. That means that there are around 44 additional pairs of matching individuals. The most likely cause is the presence of relatives (approximately 1000 sibling pairs). (see PPT Presentation)
Finally, these issues are further magnified when labs perform familial searching. Sometimes a database search will produce a close, but imperfect match to a database entry. The partial match will sometimes be used as justification to investigate a relative of the person in the database. This introduces many issues with what constitutes probable cause and civil rights. It's also important to have a sound statistical method for identifying when the true perpetrator is likely to be a relative (see Paoletti, et al. 2006).
Indeed, experts generally agree that most -- but not all -- of the Arizona matches were to be expected statistically because of the unusual [sic] way Troyer searched for them.
In a typical criminal case, investigators look for matches to a specific profile. But the Arizona search looked for any matches among all the thousands of profiles in the database, greatly increasing the odds of finding them.
An honest test of the rigor of any matching system is to pursue all matches, meaning they should not only welcome "greatly increasing the odds of finding them," their goal should be maximizing the odds of finding spurious matches. That requires that in a set of 65,000 DNA profiles, each datum must be compared to every other datum, for a total of 65,000^2 = 4.225 Billion DNA profile pairs to compare, none of which should yield a match. This is exactly the same algorithm assumed by the 1 in 113 Billion estimate of the statistical unlikelihood of a match, so their complaints about an "unusual" search method are 100% invalid, and they all know it.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
The 1 in 113 billion number is for a random pair of records to falsely indicate a match. Note that for 65,000 records, there's about two billion distinct pairs that you can make. So, if 122 of these pairs are false positives, that means that we're really looking at the odds of a false positive being about 1 in 17 million.
Based on this, false positives seem about 10,000 times more likely than what the FBI claims, but it's still nowhere near as bad the 1 in 533 you got.
From the article:
Indeed, experts generally agree that most -- but not all -- of the Arizona matches were to be expected statistically because of the unusual way Troyer searched for them.
In a typical criminal case, investigators look for matches to a specific profile. But the Arizona search looked for any matches among all the thousands of profiles in the database, greatly increasing the odds of finding them.
As a result, Thomas Callaghan, head of the FBI's CODIS unit, has dismissed Troyer's findings as "misleading" and "meaningless."
He urged authorities in several states to object to Arizona-style searches, advising them to tell courts that the probes could violate the privacy of convicted offenders, tie up crucial databases and even lead the FBI to expel offending states from CODIS -- a penalty that could cripple states' ability to solve crimes.
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I find it interesting that almost everyone here assumes that the FBI are blocking this because they've Got Something To Hide, instead of the conclusion that I, as a software engineer, automatically assumed - that they fear lawyers digging through a bunch of stuff that basically paralyzes their computer system and leaves large groups useless for their Real work.. apprehending real criminals who really do bad things.. just to prove that something unlikely really isn't so.